ENTRANCE and exit kiosks were constructed by the IRT, or Interborough Rapid Transit (today’s numbered subway lines) for its original 28 stations from City Hall north to 145th Street along Elm (now Lafayette Street) 4th/Park Avenue South, 42nd Street and Broadway. The kiosks originally had separate entrance (domed roofs) and exit (peaked roofs) structures, though I’m not sure if that distinction was carried through all the way to the kiosks’ extinction in the late 1960s.
They were always specifically referred to as “kiosks” because they were modeled after entrance and exit structures found on the oldest lines of the Budapest, Hungary’s subway (known as the Metro), constructed in 1896, which were in turn reminiscent of Hungarian summer houses, called ‘kushks’ that were modeled after similar ones found in Turkey and Persia. New York City has not constructed an entire new subway line since the 1930s, while Budapest’s newest line opened in 2014. The NYC Second Avenue Line is a northern extension of the Broadway Line; it is supposed to extend north to Harlem and south to Hanover Square, with completion in the far future. The youngest of FNY readers may see its completion in the late 21st Century.
Pretty early on, these entrance kiosks, placed on relatively narrow avenues and streets in Midtown, were interfering with sight lines of motorists and accidents were getting frequent, and so they were replaced with much less elaborate staircases and railings. All had been torn down by 1968.
See Off the Grid for more on the long-lost examples of subway architecture.
This photo, taken at Columbus Circle in 1904, is especially interesting. On the left, you can see Little Liberty, a 37-foot tall replica of Miss Liberty placed atop the Liberty Warehouse on West 64th Street. When the warehouse was torn down in the early 2000s, Little Liberty was moved to the parking lot at the Brooklyn Museum near Prospect Park. In early 2023, it was expected to be on the move once again, this time to St. Louis, Missouri.
Astor Place, one of the IRT’s original 28 stations, is especially interesting for its terra cotta station ID plaques and beavers (John Jacob Astor made his millions in the beaver fur trade), entrance to the old Wanamaker’s department store, and bricked-up entrance to the former Clinton Hall.
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Those original kiosks were in two designs. The type that now stands on Astor Place has a bit of a rounded roof at the top of the stairs. That indicated that the stairway was an entrance. For stairways that were an exit, that little roof was in the shape of a pyramid. That allowed passengers, who were looking for a subway entrance on the street, to not walk to an exit in error. It was simple and elegant.
I say that in the piece….
Whoops! And you said it much better than I did.
There are still some original IRT kiosk covers at the Wall Street station in downtown Manhattan and at Borough Hall in Brooklyn.
I remember the old ones.Decades of grime and dirt lent them a patina of funk that
no Hollywood studio could ever replicate.That R.Crumb drawing of a beatnik emerging
from one also comes to mind.
If you look very hard at the Warner Bros. cartoon “Daffy Doodles,” (directed by Bob McKimson, 1946), at one point the maniac graffiti artist Daffy Duck is seen striding into a subway station, and as Carl Stalling (music director) has the WB orchestra playing “42nd Street,” Daffy goes in, followed by cop Porky Pig, and comedy ensues. What’s noteworthy is that Daffy is clearly entering one of these kiosks that you are discussing, one marked “Entrance Uptown,” with a rounded roof. (See about 2:30 into the cartoon.) The man who painted the background image, Richard H. Thomas, was from Hackensack, so he might well have been familiar at first-hand with the design.
The kiosks were also on the Lenox Avenue section of the IRT. I remember the ones at 135 Street. How and why do I remember them? I lived at 49 W. 135th Street (between Lenox & 5th Avenues) with my aunt. She was forced to move in 1960 to accommodate the construction of a new facility for Harlem Hoepital. My memory is from 1958-1960.
An excellent summary of why and how the replica kiosk was built: https://usmodernist.org/AR/AR-1987-01.pdf
Astor Place was originally supposed to have a connection to the Hudson Tubes (now PATH) that would have ran along 8th Street, but that idea was scrapped and never happened.